Congratulations !
After Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum success last year, Arab films are getting more time in the spotlight. Oualid Mouaness and Feras Fayyad, regional film directors, had their films at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and won some awards.
Oualid Mouaness’s film 1982 has won the Netpac Award after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this month.
The film is the directors first feature film which stars Oscar-nominated director Nadine Labaki (Capernaum), and it’s based on Mouaness’s childhood remembrances of his experience when Israel’s invasion of Lebanon began in the summer of that year.
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1982 tells the story of a boy who is anxious about winning over a school crush and it’s storyline takes place over a single June day in 1982.
Mouaness’s movie was selected because “its adventurous, imaginative style and subtle, confident filmmaking, bravely juxtaposing and framing the universal innocence and charm of youth within harrowing historical context,” according to a statement by the jury.
The Cave, filmed between 2016 and 2018, won the Grolsch People’s Choice Documentary Award. It tells the story of its Oscar-nominated director Feras Fayyad (Last Men in Aleppo) who returns to his native country, Syria, with this film to follow a team of female doctors who treat casualties in an underground hospital while fighting systematic sexism.
Fayyad’s film has already been picked up by NatGeo in the US for a theatrical and TV release, and is already being buzzed for an Oscar nod.
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